John Balint of Silver Spring Twp. was the only survivor healthy enough to make it to a ceremony Monday at the Naval Support Activity Mechanicsburg in Hampden Twp. to mark the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Midway.

For weeks, the Navy had been trying to locate survivors of the World War II battle to recognize, along with their family members.

In the few days leading up to the event, several family members of other survivors in the area, mostly from the West Shore, contacted Navy spokesman Mike Randazzo to tell him that none of their loved ones would be well enough to attend.

That left the 88-year-old Balint to represent them all.

At first, he was nonplussed by his sudden fame for taking part in a turning point in the Pacific war against the Japanese.

“There isn’t very much I can tell about Midway. All I can tell is, I went there with the ship. They carried me there,” he said.

Balint was a ship’s serviceman second class whose job on the USS Atlanta was doing laundry. The ship was an antiaircraft cruiser whose job was to protect the USS Enterprise, an aircraft carrier.

Then, on June 4, Japanese planes started coming. Balint went from washing clothes to behind the guns.

“The planes came, we fired on them with our antiaircraft guns and light guns, 20 millimeters and 1.1s, and if our shots were good, the planes came down. If they weren’t, then the planes still flew around. There isn’t much else I can tell you about that, and that went on for three days,” Balint said after Monday’s ceremony.

Historians say that what Balint and the others accomplished in the Battle of Midway from June 4 to 7, 1942, changed the world in a way few other battles ever have.

Six months after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese were on the offensive and the U.S. was still on the ropes. The Japanese sought to gain a foothold at Midway, a tiny atoll in the Pacific, roughly the midpoint between Tokyo and San Francisco, to extend the empire’s defensive perimeter and to launch airstrikes to Hawaii and the U.S. West Coast.

But the Japanese didn’t know that the U.S. had broken their code. The U.S. sent a fake message telling the Japanese that the water supply on Midway was running low. When the Japanese responded, the Americans knew that Midway was the empire’s target.

In a stunning U.S. victory, 3,000 Japanese were killed and the Navy sank four Japanese aircraft carriers, all of which had been used in the Pearl Harbor attack. The U.S. lost one carrier, one destroyer and 307 lives.

Midway is recognized as the turning point of the war in the Pacific, when Japan began to lose its advantage and the U.S. began to gain the offensive that would lead to the defeat of the Japanese.

“It was a defining moment in World War II. We couldn’t afford to lose, and we didn’t,” Rear Adm. Mark Heinrich, commander of the Naval Supply Systems Command, said in remarks during the commemoration.

Yet despite all this, historians say the Battle of Midway has never gotten its due. Midway has always been in the shadow of D-Day.

But as then-U.S. Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger said in 2003 during a speech marking the 61st anniversary of the naval battle, “Without Midway, there would have been no D-Day on 6 June 1944, with all that that implies about the condition of postwar Europe.”

Had the Japanese won at Midway, President Franklin D. Roosevelt would not have been free to pursue the Europe-first strategy during World War II, Schlesinger said. He contended the former Soviet Union would have emerged more dominant, shaping postwar Europe in a way that would have doomed more of the continent to the Iron Curtain.

To Balint, who joined the Navy five days after Pearl Harbor, Midway was just part of a job he had to do.

Five months later Balint was on the USS Atlanta when it was sunk during a naval battle with the Japanese at Guadalcanal.

Balint served in the Navy until the end of the war. He returned home to Perth Amboy, N.J., and eventually found work with The Ford Motor Company. He retired in 1981 after more than 33 years with the car company.

“I don’t think it’s anything great that I did. I just had a job,” Balint said of the Battle of Midway. “They gave me a job, and I did it.”

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